A Unique Protease Cleavage Site Predicted in the Spike Protein of the Novel Pneumonia Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Potentially Related to Viral Transmissibility

In December 2019, a novel human coronavirus caused an epidemic of severe pneumonia (Coronavirus Disease 2019, COVID-19) in Wuhan, Hubei, China (Wu et al. 2020; Zhu et al. 2020). So far, this virus has spread to all areas of China and even to other countries. The epidemic has caused 67,102 confirmed infections with 1526 fatal cases worldwide by February 14th, 2020. The viral infection incubation period varies from 2 to 14 days and typical clinical symptoms are fever, dry cough, dyspnea, headache, and pneumonia. Disease onset may result in progressive respiratory failure due to alveolar damage and even death (Chan et al. 2020; Chen et al. 2020; Huang et al. 2020).